


Starkiller's Child

by partialresonance



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Domestic Fluff, Feel-good ending, M/M, More angst than intended, POV Child
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-14
Updated: 2020-07-14
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:28:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25266097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/partialresonance/pseuds/partialresonance
Summary: Written for Gingerpilot Week 2020 Day 4: DomesticPoe and Armitage’s daughter takes after both her dads. It isn’t easy when she finds out about her father’s actions during the war, but their little family is strong enough to weather any storm.
Relationships: Poe Dameron/Armitage Hux
Comments: 29
Kudos: 74
Collections: Gingerpilot Week 2020





	Starkiller's Child

Shara is four years old when she realizes that everyone hates her father.

It crashes over her in a single, swift bolt as if from a blaster. The way the other children have always jeered whenever the red-haired man is in sight. The way the other parents whisper to each other, casting narrow-eyed glances at them, looking away quickly when caught. Shara was too young to put the pieces together until suddenly, she wasn’t.

When she finally understands (thinks she understands), she is furious.

“My mommy says your daddy is a bad man!”

“Shut up!” She shrieks, and when she hears the other children laughing she pounces on the first, the one who spoke, the one who dared call her father a bad man because he’s _not_ , he’s _not._

The boy’s name is Luinn and he has a bloodied nose before the caretaker can pull Shara off of him.

Shara waits in the receiving room of the little daycare on the old Resistance-base-turned-town, slumped in a chair with her arms crossed and glaring sullenly at the woman with grey-streaked hair pulled back into a careless bun.

Twenty minutes later her dad sweeps into the room, faded leather jacket open at the neck and hands already on his hips before he’s even stopped moving.

“Commander Dameron,” the daycare director greets him with a deferential nod and her dad blows out a frustrated breath, rolling his eyes. He goes to Shara while he answers, placing a warm hand on her shoulder.

“First of all, I’m retired, and you know that,” he says, a bit snippily. “And second of all, it’s Hux-Dameron. Poe Hux-Dameron, and what’s this I hear about some kids bullying my daughter?”

“That’s a fine way of putting it, Mr. Hux-Dameron,” the woman says coolly, “when Miss Shara here is responsible for giving her playmate a broken nose.”

Her dad tries to hide it by running his hand over his mouth, but Shara sees the smile. She sits up straighter in her chair.

The director sees it, too.

“Is something funny, Mr. Dam—” She breaks off, gives him a tight smile. “You’ll have to forgive me, it’s been quite the day. And such a long name, it’s difficult to remember.”

A brief moment of tense silence follows as her dad looks at the woman with barely contained fury. Shara has never felt taller, more _vindicated_ than when she’s at her dad’s side with his protective anger pointed at someone who had wronged her.

He looks away from the woman, addresses his daughter instead.

“Shara, sweetie? Where’s your bag?”

“Here, daddy.” She stands, turns around and bends to pick up the bag from its place under the chair, straightens again. Her dad’s arm wraps completely around her shoulders.

“Let’s go.”

“Mr. Hux-Da—”

“Save it,” he snaps, slicing the air with a hand. “I can see my family isn’t welcome here. You don’t have to worry, we won’t be back.” And with that, he marches Shara from the daycare, and she barely resists turning to stick her tongue out at the woman as they go.

Shara whoops when she sees the old speeder bike with its modified sidecar parked outside the daycare. She doesn’t notice the tight lines of worry around her dad’s eyes as he smiles and places the helmet on her head, buckling the strap under her chin, careful as always not to pinch her skin.

When they pull up in front of the house her father is waiting for them on the doorstep.

Shara yells, “Papa!” And bolts from the bike as soon as her dad removes the helmet, leaping into her father’s arms.

He scoops her up and presses her to his chest, burying his face in her hair. His thin arms wrap around her back almost painfully tight.

Dad always holds her like he’s shielding her from the world. Papa holds her like without her he would fall apart.

Shara won’t know how to describe the feeling this gives her for many, many years. It makes her feel singular. Important. Cherished. Loved. Powerful.

For now, all she knows is that she’s happy.

Her dads set her up at the little table in their tiny kitchen with a snack and BB-8 to watch over her as they talk in the living room. She munches away happily, listening to a conversation she only partially understands.

“You did _what?”_

“Well what was I supposed to do?”

“Oh, Dameron.” Shara can imagine Papa pinching the bridge of his nose. He always does when he uses that tone of voice. “That’s the only daycare on base.”

“So what? You’re home most of the day.”

“I’m still _working,_ Poe.”

Shara takes another bite, grinning happily at BB-8. Papa always has a datapad in his hand, or close by. She’s seen him up at all hours of the night, like when she wakes from a bad dream and stumbles bleary-eyed out of her room. He’s always there on the couch, ready to swoop in with a glass of water and comforting words, holding her until she falls back asleep.

“And besides that, we can’t just lock her up in the house all day! She needs to be with children her age. You’re going to turn your cute little—”

Whoops. Papa said a bad word. Shara stifles a giggle behind her hand while BB-8 flashes a few lights and wobbles his head in embarrassment.

“—around and go right back to that center and apologize. Grovel, if you have to.”

“Hugs, baby, I’m not taking Shara back there. We’ll move.”

“No.” Papa’s voice is firm. “Absolutely not. Your friends are here. Your _life_ is here.”

“My life is wherever you are. You and Shara. You’re all I need.”

“Shara—“

“It’s not good for Shara to be here! Not if that’s how everyone feels. You think this’ll all just go away if I apologize? Those kids—their parents—kriff ‘em. We’ll go somewhere else.”

“Everywhere will be the same.” Papa sighs, sounding tired. “Everywhere worth being.”

There is a pause. The house is so quiet that Shara doesn’t dare take another bite in case they can hear her chewing and know that she can hear them talking. She wants to know what comes next.

“You knew this was coming, Poe.”

Papa is speaking very quietly now, and Shara decides to get up from the table and sneak over to the door. She presses her ear to the crack like she’s seen kids do in holos when they want to be sneaky and hear something they shouldn’t. It works well.

“Baby…” Her dad’s voice is very soft. Shara frowns. It sounds like someone is breathing weirdly.

“Why did you agree to this?” Papa’s voice is strained and too high.

“Why are you trying to blame me?” Dad laughs and Shara thinks that’s very weird. Neither of them sound happy.

“Because this _hurts_ , Poe. Maker, I hate that it’s hurting her. I can’t stand it and it’s only going to get worse when she gets older.”

Shara can’t stand it any longer. She bursts through the door.

Papa is sitting on the couch, bent forward with his head in his hands. Dad is kneeling on the ground in front of him, rubbing little circles on the tops of his thighs. They both whip their heads around to look at her. Papa swipes a hand quickly over his eyes.

BB-8 rolls out of the kitchen in her wake, beeping apologetically.

“What are you talking about?” Shara blurts out. “Am I in trouble?”

“No, honey, no.” Dad is quick to reassure her. He stands and walks towards her but Shara darts around him and heads straight for Papa. She stares right in his eyes, her little fists digging in to her hips in what she doesn’t realize is an exact miniature replica of her dad’s posture as she declares:

“I don’t want to go back there! Everyone is stupid!” She stamps her foot. “They said mean things about you!” She’s shaking, angry tears in her eyes. “I hate them!”

“I know,” Papa whispers, “I know.”

“Let’s watch a movie!” Dad suddenly says, clapping his hands to break the intense stare between his husband and their daughter.

They settle onto the couch, Shara sitting between them while Dad’s arm is stretched out to circle Papa’s shoulders, drawing them together into a protective little triangle around her. BB-8 takes up a spot at Dad’s feet and they turn on one of Shara’s favorite movies. The upsetting events of the day seem to melt away, and Shara curls up to Papa’s side, clutching his shirt in her small fist.

“Pass me the popcorn, Hugs,” Dad says, and Papa smiles as he hands the bowl over. Shara giggles.

“Why do you call him Hugs?” _His name is Papa. Duh._

“Well, when we first met—”

“It’s a war story,” Papa says quickly, shooting Dad a dirty look. “You wouldn’t like it.”

“Babe,” Dad chuckles, “it’s not really a war story.”

Papa somehow gets the final word, without saying anything else.

Shara is ten years old when she realizes she hates her father.

She knows that he did something during the war that people are still angry about. She saw a glimpse of the holovid, once—all she remembers is a bright red light and someone who doesn’t look quite like her father shouting on a stage.

That was all she managed to see before the feed was cut, a teacher snatching the datapad from her classmate’s hands and sending them both to the office.

Shara hasn’t thought about it too much since then. She’s more interested in school and her friends and rushing home so her dad can take her up in his decommissioned A-wing, doing loops only after swearing Shara to secrecy. They’d both be in hot water with her papa if he ever found out.

So it’s almost at random that one night after finishing her homework Shara keeps the datapad out and searches her father’s name on the holonet—and her eyes go wide as the results flood in. Certain words jump out at her—

_Killed billions—_

_Planetary annihilation—_

_Starkiller?_

That brings her up short.

It’s a remembered schoolyard taunt, always quickly crushed by her teachers but now Shara realizes it means more than she originally thought.

What was Starkiller? And why does that word send a chill down her spine?

Shara nearly drops the datapad when she clicks on the video and suddenly there is her father—younger, and angry, so _angry_ —screaming above a sea of black- and white-armored troops. The bad guys.

The sky erupts into fire and the red light reflects in her eyes as she begins to cry.

“Shara?” Her papa knocks on the door but opens it without waiting for an answer—she’s at that age where she doesn’t really get more than the illusion of privacy—and she jerks her head up at him, still clutching the datapad in a shaking grip.

“Go away!” She screams. In a fit of rage she throws the datapad across the room and it smacks into the wall, falling to the ground, screen cracked. She doesn’t see her father’s wide eyes, the way he stumbles back. She buries her head in her arms and cries and cries.

She feels betrayed.

She can’t articulate why this hurts so much but it’s because she’s always defended him. She has always believed he was a good person but right there in her hands is the evidence that he is _not._ That all the kids and teachers and everyone else was right all along and that she, Shara, was the fool.

“I hate you!” She lifts her head to shout it to his face but he is gone.

With a frustrated cry Shara flings herself down on the bed and yanks the covers up over her head. Now that she’s quieter she can hear her papa’s frantic voice in the other room—

“Poe? Poe? Please come home, please, I can’t do this, she—”

Shara groans and tries to block it out, pressing her hands over her ears. She doesn’t want to hear his voice. She doesn’t hear her papa anymore, she hears _that man._ That man from the video.

Starkiller.

“I should leave you,” she overhears, later that night. “I should leave you both so she can hate me properly.”

Her dads are eating in the other room, although she only hears one spoon clinking against the bowl. She imagines her papa’s pinched, pale face, probably buried in his hands again.

“You don’t mean that.”

“I do, I do.” He laughs and Shara is old enough now to recognize when a laugh merely plasters over despair. “What I’m doing to her is worse than anything Brendol ever did to me. I got to hate him. It was easy. This isn’t easy for her. It never will be. I should just be the man she sees in that holo.”

“Easy is overrated. She’s a kid, Hugs! And in a few years she’ll be a teenager. That kriff is _never_ easy, doesn’t matter who you have as a dad. And you’re a _good father_. I don’t tell you that enough.”

“I told myself I would never regret what I did.”

“I know you had your reasons.”

“She’s not going to—Poe. The day is going to come when she’ll decide she wants nothing more to do with me. Maybe it’s already here.”

“You don’t know that. Give her a chance.”

“She’s good, Poe. Like you.”

“Like you,” her dad whispers back, almost too softly for Shara to hear.

Shara is fourteen years old when she realizes she could never hate her father. Even if she should.

The past few years have been hard on their little family. Shara spends as much time out of the house as possible—she throws herself into her schoolwork, she sleeps over with friends. Most of them are children of her father’s friends: Mr. and Mrs. Tico’s twins, the Skywalker-Solo horde. They’re like a big, extended family. Barbecues and birthday parties follow one after the other in an endless march around the year and Shara pretends not to notice that the only one left out is her father.

Armitage, she calls him now.

He attends the get-togethers more often than not. She evens sees the other parents try to talk to him—but at this age Shara has developed a shrewd eye for social interaction, and she can tell that Armitage distances himself on purpose. It starts to eat at her, even though she’s still mad at him. She feels like he lied to her—but then, when she thinks about it, can’t remember a single instance when he did. He had always been upfront, had always told her exactly as much as she wanted to know and was capable of understanding.

She hasn’t quite gotten over her discovery of his past crimes, but still—something protective stirs in her whenever she sees him, of late.

One bright Saturday Shara finishes her homework and sets aside the datapad on the little table in the kitchen. She taps her fingers on the table and looks out the window, where she can see Armitage bent over in their small garden. His T-shirt is damp with sweat and clinging to his back, and it makes her think of all the times she’s seen her dad bring sunblock and water out to him. Poe has to take care of him, because Armitage is not good at taking care of himself. This is something else Shara has come to understand only very recently.

She frowns, glancing aside as BB-8 rolls past, beeping to her in greeting. Poe is away for the day, and as Shara turns in her seat she sees Armitage’s sun hat sitting on the couch. He must have forgotten to take it outside with him. On a whim she stands and grabs the hat, not letting herself think too much of it before walking outside.

Armitage’s garden is something of a project, for him—he turns everything he can into a project, Shara thinks with begrudging fondness. It’s almost more engineering than gardening: there is piping for irrigation half-buried in the specially composted soil, and at present Armitage is adjusting the supports for a sun shade that covers a row of delicate plants. Meanwhile, his own face and arms are already an angry red.

Shara takes after him in many ways. Her red curls are an untamable mane, and freckles dot her nose and cheeks and the tops of her shoulders. She doesn’t burn as easily, though, whereas Armitage’s pale complexion starts to redden and sting in a matter of minutes. She crosses the yard, sunhat in hand, and bites her lip as a wave of nerves settles in her stomach. She hasn’t been alone with Armitage in a long time.

His back stiffens and his hands pause in their delicate maneuverings as he hears her approach. Shara comes to stand beside him, her shoes squelching in the damp grass where the irrigation had run over from the raised garden bed into the yard. Armitage sits back on his heels, hands resting on his thighs, his gardening gloves leaving streaks of soil on his trousers. He squints up at her and a faint, hesitant smile appears, though combined with his worried brow it looks a little sad.

“Hello, dear. Can—can I help you with something?”

His voice is eager, a bit shaky, and Shara feels it like a punch to the gut as she realizes that that’s truly all he wants, all he thinks he can have: a brief moment of being allowed near her because she requires something that normally Poe would provide, but Poe is not here, so Armitage must do. Shara swallows and wordlessly extends the sunhat to him. She sees his hands twitch into fists.

“Ah.” He seems disappointed, trying to hide it. “Yes, thank you.” He reaches out and grasps the rim of the hat. “That’s very thoughtful, thank you dear.”

Shara lets go of the hat, her hand falling to her side. Armitage doesn’t put it on right away; he holds it in his lap, looking down at it and worrying the rim in his hands, casting furtive little glances at Shara. She wishes he would put it on. The back of his neck is red, the bridge of his nose already starting to peel. When she stands over him like this she can see the resolute march of grey in his hair, which now has as many silver highlights as gold. It hadn’t always been that way.

“Is there—” He’s looking down, creasing the sunhat in his grip, “Is there anything—”

_“Is there anything I can do?”_

_“No!” Shara, eleven years old and still furious, determined to always be furious at him because he’s a liar, he’s a murderer, he’s a bad man._ _“I don’t want to talk to you ever again!”_

Shara drops to her knees in the grass beside him and flings her arms around her father.

Armitage gives a surprised little gasp, almost like a hiccup. He doesn’t move for a few seconds, and Shara squeezes harder, wondering if he has always been this small. She can wrap her arms around him easily and suddenly she is struck by the unbearable realization of her father’s fragility. He’s breakable, _mortal_. Time changes him, he is subject to the volatility of emotions, even the sun seems determined to peel back his layers until there is nothing left.

When he lifts his arms to finally embrace her back Shara feels the first tears sting her eyes.

“I love you, dad.” She whispers the words she has not said to him since she was a little girl.

“Oh.” He gives a shaky exhale, his thin arms tightening around her. She can feel his breath stuttering, can hear the croak in his voice when he tries to speak, fails, swallows, and tries again. “I love you. I love you so much, sweetheart. More than anything in the galaxy.” He clutches at her, and she can feel his chest jumping in a muted sob.

“Stop crying,” she says thickly, leaning back enough to punch him on the arm—not hard, more like the way she punches Annie Tico when she wants the other girl’s attention, when she’s being so unattainably _wonderful_ that it makes Shara mad. Armitage chuckles, Shara sniffs and wipes angrily at her eyes, and then they’re hugging again. She doesn’t even look up when the whine of Poe’s speeder fills the air. She wants to cram all four years of withheld affection into this one crushing embrace.

There are soft footsteps in the grass behind them, and then Poe’s jaunty voice—full of bubbly joy, surprise, and laughter—resounds above them.

“Hey! Can I get in on this?”

Shara doesn’t look up. She buries her face in Armitage’s chest and knows that he is blinking tearily up at Poe, feels him extending a hand to her other dad, and then the three of them are kneeling in the grass and Shara sighs in contentment at the forgotten, wonderful feeling of being embraced by them both.

**Author's Note:**

> I might eventually write more in this 'verse because I really came to love Shara by the end, and I'd like to break out of her POV in the future and do a bit more worldbuilding about the town.


End file.
